


sleep deprivation

by Anonymous



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:59:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7760521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Pynch Week, Day One, Alternative Meetings/Universe</p><p>Adam is a Psych Major who works as a lab assistant for a professor running sleep deprivation studies. Ronan signs up for one of the studies and Adam has to go out of his way to check on him because Ronan won't stay upstairs and play games with everyone else. Instead, he has commandeered one of the lecture halls in the basement for a Top Gear marathon. Adam is kind of charmed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sleep deprivation

    When Adam had landed his first student lab assistant gig, the irony of the study he was assigned to had not escaped him. Adam lived his life in a constant state of sleep deprivation, always playing games with himself to stay awake long enough to attend one more class or get through one more shift at the garage. It seemed like poetic justice when Dr. Steck invited him on as a lab assistant with her sleep deprivation study. He had plenty of practical experience, after all. 

    Now, rounding the end of his Junior year at Dartmouth, Adam had three rounds of studies under his belt and at least got seniority to choose his own shift for the long nights at Moore spent supervising the latest crop of students who had signed up for the study. He keyed his way into the building at just before 3 A.M. to find the building eerily quiet, but somehow expectant in a way that only an academic building at 3 A.M. could be. Adam shuffled his way up two floors to Dr. Steck’s office to check in. The closer he got, the more signs of life there were in the hallways. The small computer lab had a sprinkling of students staring blearily at screens, while the faculty lounge next door had been set up with pizzas and coke and a large gaggle of students spilled out in the hallway with various board and card games on the floor around them. It was the point in the night when the laughter started to sound a little hysterical and the student assistants had to keep a closer eye on them to make sure each student only got the amount of caffeine and cigarettes that they had indicated was normal intake for them. Adam preferred later morning shifts when the second wind had given way to subdued exhaustion, but he had to be at the garage by 7 A.M., so this was the best option.

    “Adam, my man!” Henry Cheng brightened considerably the moment he saw Adam. He had been leaning against one of the tables laden with pizza while he watched a game of “Never Have I Ever” from a safe distance. Now, he got up and steered Adam towards Dr. Steck’s office which had been set up as a kind of field office for the lab assistants with an emergency stash of coffee and energy bars that weren’t available to study participants just in case they overstimulated.

    The hard work of the studies - parsing data and analyzing - came later. On the night of the actual studies, Adam and his fellow lab assistants were basically glorified babysitters with the sole goal of keeping all of their study participants awake all night. It mostly meant prodding them awake when their eyes got too heavy and keeping track of how many Cokes they had drank.

    “Pretty much everyone is up here,” Henry said, handing Adam a clipboard of names. “There’s a few in the computer lab and then some are reading in the atrium. It’s been pretty controlled so far.”

    Adam looked over the clipboard and blinked, trying to make the words swim into focus. His brain was foggy from the three hours of sleep he himself had gotten that night. Henry smiled in sympathy, buzzing with an energy that Adam had a hard time not hating him for. Henry was tolerable mainly because his work was impeccable, otherwise Adam would have found him insufferable. 

    “Oh,” Henry said as he handed Adam a cup of coffee. He offered the carafe of half-and-half but Adam waved him off. He preferred it black. “And Ronan Lynch is in the basement. He’s a  _ delight _ .”

    Henry described most everyone that way, but with slightly different inflections to imply his real meaning. Adam was still decoding most of Henry’s inflections, but he was pretty sure this one meant, “He’s an asshole.” He nodded his understanding and Henry clapped him on the back. Adam set off to do rounds around the atrium and computer lab, marking off names as he went to indicate that the study participants were still awake and alert when he’d checked on them. They had to do it every half-hour or so, especially when it got so late. Students usually hit their second wind around 3 A.M. and then started flagging again around 5 and 6.

    Once he’d marked off everyone except the guy down in the basement, Adam handed the clipboard back over to Henry and made his way downstairs. The hallways were dark, lit only by emergency lights, but Adam didn’t bother flicking on the lights. The dark was actually a little comforting at this time of night and the fluorescent glare would have hurt his eyes.

    It wasn’t hard to find Ronan Lynch. The lecture hall that he had commandeered was open and soft light from the projector was bleeding out into the otherwise dim hallway, the sound of muffled voices leading Adam in the right direction.

    Adam stopped in the doorway and studied the shaved head and aggressive tilt of shoulders that belonged to the student currently sprawled out at one of the tables with his feet propped up on the table in a way that would have set any professor’s blood boiling. He was tall, at least from what Adam could tell, and wearing dark jeans and a black tank. Most of the other students had opted for sweats and bare feet by now, but this guy still had his leather boots on. 

_     Top Gear  _ was streaming through the projector onto the big lecture screen and Adam had to admit it was a pretty sweet set-up. Much better than sitting on cold tile and playing Cards Against Humanities twenty times in a row. The man turned when Adam pulled up a chair and Adam was flooded with recognition.

    He  _ knew _ Ronan Lynch. 

    Ronan clearly recognized him too, but shrugged at him instead of saying hello. He snapped shut what Adam thought might be a sketchbook and pushed it to the side before fixing his attention back on the show. It was one of the episodes where the hosts were racing across Europe, one of them in a Camaro and the other two on a train. The train was currently winning.

    Adam thought of the furiously orange Camaro that Ronan had limped into the shop over a year ago. It had been in great condition, except for the fact that its right passenger door had been the victim of what was probably a tree or pole  and its engine seemed to be possessed. Ronan had been spitting mad when they’d told him it would be a few weeks before they could have it fixed and had paid an obscene amount of money to speed up the timeline. Adam had pulled double-shifts for a week to work on that stupid car and still hadn’t completely exorcised its demons before Ronan had requisitioned it back. Boyd had at least been able to fix the door and restore the paint, but Adam had never fully figured out why the engine misbehaved so badly. It still drove him crazy sometimes - he liked solving problems and Ronan had deprived him of the answer all those months ago by being impatient. 

    “How’s the Camaro?” Adam asked drily after it was clear that Ronan would not initiate the conversation. Ronan looked unreasonably annoyed at the question and stared boredly ahead at his TV show instead of answering. “Have any more run-ins with trees?”

    “Wasn’t a tree,” Ronan said. His fingers were tapping a furious rhythm on the table when he slid a look over to Adam that felt like a warning. Adam shrugged, unintimidated. He flicked his eyes back to  _ Top Gear  _ and watched as the host’s blue Camaro got stuck in a long line of traffic. The Camaro was going to lose whatever race they were running - the train it was racing against to get to Italy was hours ahead of it. 

    Adam said so. Ronan grunted in what might have been agreement. They watched in silence as the Camaro did in fact lose.

Adam needed to go back upstairs and check in on the other students, but a new episode of  _ Top Gear  _ started playing and he stayed without really thinking. His phone buzzed with a text from Henry to let him know that Henry’s shift was over and Adam, dragging a hand over his face, stood up to leave.

“Come upstairs if you feel like you might fall asleep,” Adam said and then, because Ronan didn’t acknowledge him, he said, “Hope your monster of a car is doing okay.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ronan said flatly. “It’s Gansey’s monster, not mine.”

“Gansey? As in Dick Gansey?” Adam winced at his own question. He wondered if Ronan could hear the sharp acid in his tone. Adam tried not to hate Dick Gansey, but it was hard. A split second later, Adam wondered why on earth Ronan would have had Dick Gansey’s wrecked car and how they knew each other, but before he could ask, Ronan looked at him appraisingly. 

“You know him?” Ronan asked, looking entirely uninterested in the answer.

“No, not really,” Adam said hastily. It would have earned a raised eyebrow from anyone else, but Ronan Lynch seemed unconcerned. Adam almost added,  _ He’s dating my ex-girlfriend _ just to see if that would elicit a reaction. Almost, but didn’t. Instead, he said, “I know of him. And apparently, I’m familiar with his car.”

Ronan’s smile was a dangerous, mocking thing and Adam felt a little smaller just by looking at it. He left to find Henry. He spent the rest of his shift upstairs, prodding the other students awake when needed and supervising cigarette breaks. At 6:30 A.M., Dr. Steck swept into the building and Adam debriefed her before grabbing his own bag and driving to the garage to start his shift there. He needed to gulp down three cups of bitter, black coffee before he could get his head straight enough to look at the belts of a Civic that had been dropped off late last night.  

His shift was almost over when a silver BMW growled its way into the lot. When Adam went out to talk to the driver, he was almost struck dumb to discover Ronan Lynch smirking up at him. 

“You should be sleeping,” Adam said. “Not driving.”

Ronan shrugged.

“I needed an oil change,” he said. He was looking at Adam again, in the same appraisingly way from earlier and it was entirely too unsettling.

“And it needed to happen after you’ve been kept awake for 36 hours for a sleep experiment?”

Ronan smirked at some private joke that Adam wasn’t in on.

“I don’t sleep much,” he said.

Adam thought that it might be the first thing they really had in common. When he pulled the oil stick out of the BMW a few minutes later, it was obvious Ronan had not really needed an oil change at all. He couldn’t decided if this was Ronan’s backwards way of bragging about his perfect, shiny BMW or a strange overture at friendship.  He did the oil change anyways and then when handed the keys back to Ronan, he tried his best to radiate indifference.  

“I think I liked the Camaro better,” he said, as offhandedly as he could as he tapped at the computer to get Ronan’s receipt. “A little more of a challenge.”

Ronan’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but then he seemed to catch that Adam was pulling his chain. 

“Dick will be thrilled,” Ronan said, emphasizing  _ Dick _ in an unkind way that was at odds with the way he’d casually talked of Gansey earlier.

“Surprised he still talks to you after the tree incident,” Adam said. 

“Wasn’t a tree.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> * to head off your questions, I have no immediate plans to continue this, but it was a lot of fun - i could probably be convinced
> 
> ** That is literally the only episode of Top Gear I’ve ever seen, idk.
> 
> *** back when it was me torturing student assistants in sleep studies, I watched Prison Break for literally 10 hours straight in a lecture hall in the basement and they had to keep coming down to check on me every half hour. #noragrets
> 
> i love your comments and feedback!!


End file.
